BP ignored industry-wide safety standards as it pushed to extract every drop of oil from the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico.
In short, improve safety regulations.
In a knee-jerk response designed to gain positive headlines, President Obama ordered a deepwater drilling moratorium, which a federal judge overturned last month. But the legal fight goes on.
A scarce commodity in this nation is jobs. And shutting down oil wells will put thousands of Gulf residents out of work. Which will have unfortunate ripple effects, even though the Obama administration believes it's assisting the people of the region.
From Time's Ecocentric blog:
But that ignores the economic importance that offshore drilling has for the state of Louisiana. Energy—in all its facets—contributes about $65 billion to Louisiana's $210 billion economy, compared to about $10 billion for fishing and tourism. It's horribly unfair but the fact that fishing and tourism is on its knees in southern Louisiana because of the spill only makes those remaining jobs in the oil and gas industry all the more valuable. (It's a bit like New York City, where Wall Street's greed may have helped cause the recession—yet the financial industry's tax revenues were so important to the city that its leaders still fought further regulation.)Don't shut down deepwater wells. Don't
There is nothing else, at least not right now. And the state is accustomed to fishing, boating and drilling all happening side by side. Gulf coast residents like to say that their coast is a "working coast," and you can see it, where oil wells are next to wildife refuges, pelicans perch on offshore platforms and the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival is not an oxymoron.
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